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A photon (from Ancient Greek φῶς, φωτός (phôs, phōtós) 'light') is an elementary particle that is a quantum of the electromagnetic field, including electromagnetic radiation such as light and radio waves, and the force carrier for the electromagnetic force.
The term candlepower was originally defined in the United Kingdom, by the Metropolitan Gas Act 1860, as the light produced by a pure spermaceti candle that weighs 1 ⁄ 6 pound (76 grams) and burns at a rate of 120 grains per hour (7.8 grams per hour).
For example, fireflies produce light by this means and boats moving through water can disturb plankton which produce a glowing wake. Certain substances produce light when they are illuminated by more energetic radiation, a process known as fluorescence. Some substances emit light slowly after excitation by more energetic radiation.
Only 30% of the Sun's ultraviolet light reaches the ground, and almost all of this is well transmitted. Visible light is well transmitted in air, a property known as an atmospheric window, as it is not energetic enough to excite nitrogen, oxygen, or ozone, but too energetic to excite molecular vibrational frequencies of water vapor and CO2. [50]
The SI unit of luminous flux is the lumen (lm). One lumen is defined as the luminous flux of light produced by a light source that emits one candela of luminous intensity over a solid angle of one steradian.
One of the first and easiest sources was created by attenuating a conventional laser beam to reduce its intensity and thereby the mean photon number per pulse. [38] Since the photon statistics follow a Poisson distribution one can achieve sources with a well defined probability ratio for the emission of one versus two or more photons. For ...
The lumen is defined as amount of light given into one steradian by a point source of one candela strength; while the candela, a base SI unit, is defined as the luminous intensity of a source of monochromatic radiation, of frequency 540 terahertz, and a radiant intensity of 1/683 watts per steradian.
A light-year is the distance light travels in one Julian year, around 9461 billion kilometres, 5879 billion miles, or 0.3066 parsecs. In round figures, a light year is nearly 10 trillion kilometres or nearly 6 trillion miles. Proxima Centauri, the closest star to Earth after the Sun, is around 4.2 light-years away. [89]